Rudeboy

There really isn't any such thing as a mixture - the compounds aren't compatible. "Rubberized Compound" means asphalt 100% of the time. All asphalt roofing materials have rubber added for stability. Since the sellers know that people know that asphalt is crap, they call it rubberized compound because they don't have the balls to call it what it is. It's a despicable ploy to trick people into believing it's something other than what it is. Ought to be illegal. Sorry.

Denatured alcohol is what I recommend as well. Fresh paint shouldn't need any prep. I start with a water based cleaner for really dirty surfaces. An alcohol final waste just removes any residue, oils or grease. As long as the surface is clean, you are good. Something to watch out for if you've done any body work is Bondo dust. Make sure that's cleaned off. The only time CLD Tiles have had adhesive failure was on a car that spent 2 years in a body shop. After he got rid of the dust, everything was fine. Yeah too bad i already have mega fatmat or watever their "butyl" mat is so i didnt get SDS deadening products. I got it a while ago so guess im stuck with it hopefully it lasts even though everything i read lately says it won't. Its not fresh paint and has been in a shop til today so it will need to be treated wenever i get to doing it. Delicate area here, but I would check to be sure it really is butyl before installing it. You can drop a 1" square in an ounce or so of mineral spirits. Leave it for a few hours. If the liquid turns black, you should be OK if it's brown, the adhesive is actually asphalt and will be more trouble than it's worth - you'd be better off using nothing if you care about the vehicle. I only mention this because FatMat and several others have a history of claiming a product is butyl when it is not.

Denatured alcohol is what I recommend as well. Fresh paint shouldn't need any prep. I start with a water based cleaner for really dirty surfaces. An alcohol final waste just removes any residue, oils or grease. As long as the surface is clean, you are good. Something to watch out for if you've done any body work is Bondo dust. Make sure that's cleaned off. The only time CLD Tiles have had adhesive failure was on a car that spent 2 years in a body shop. After he got rid of the dust, everything was fine.

I think Rudy is thinking the same thing as me. Your cars electrical system can't feed the electric fan enough amps to sufficantly cool the car, with the amplifier on and the car sitting still(no air flow). Upgrading your electrical sounds like a good start. Or the fan could be dead or the coolant temp sensor sensor that controls it could be bad. 4 cylinder cars can run cool enough when they are moving to not need the fan. I think I remember seeing that this is a Cavalier. A lot of GM 4 bangers from that era had sensor problems.

Have you tried sitting parked in the car with the engine running and the system off? Maybe you never did that before? Is the fan working? It should kick on when the engine temp rises.

Were you running the A/C while parked with the engine running?

Appreciate the kind words.

Doesn't even need to be FL. A lot of us have looked at the air temperature inside a car as the determining factor. It turns out that the temperature at the sheet metal for a vehicle parked in the sun is much higher. I've measured 180°F at the sheet metal in my silver car, parked in the sun for a few hours in Maryland. A dark car will add 10-20°. Internal air temperature was around 130°F. Rubberized asphalt melts at 180°. Even low grade buytl will turn into gooey slop at these temperatures. Nothing like pulling wire through a car on a hot summer day and having it come through coated in the butyl adhesive that was supposed to be good to 250°. The more important point is that we have been conditioned to look at these products in terms of price per square foot. Since we've been told we need several layers everywhere, it seemed like a sensible metric. Problem is, asphalt and low quality butyl with thin foil layers perform similarly - terribly. The testing I've done points to it taking from 6-10 times as much of these materials to APPROACH the performance of a proper constrained layer vibration damper. Put that number into your calculations and you will do more work, spend more money and end up with a treatment you can't rely on. Why bother?

This thread is about using ASPHALT materials.

Somebody on CA.com asked the same question in this thread. This photo pretty much sums it up:

Stiffening isn't a job for any vibration damper - it'd be like breaking your arm and deciding to build a cast out of Band-Aids. It might help a little, but you'd need thousands of them and it wouldn't work well enough to be worth the effort. As has been mentioned, you have to brace a flexing panel. When you introduce enough internal pressure to deform a panel you are taking it well beyond what it was designed to do. It needs to be reinforced. When that's done, you will very likely still have panel resonance and that's where the vibration damper comes in. The other important point is that vibration dampers and maximizing SPL are not a good mix. Panel resonance produces sound that can be metered. Vibration dampers convert vibration to heat which can't be metered. All of this explains why we've all heard reports of vibration damper being applied in one case gaining a dB or so and in another case, losing a dB or so. Stiffening and conversion to heat are offsetting mechanisms. It can go either way and is all but impossible to predict ahead of time. Brace without vibration damper and you can be pretty confident that SPL will increase since you aren't losing energy to panel distortion or conversion to heat. It'll sound terrible but sounding good isn't always the goal

Last time I needed some late on a Sunday night, I found it a Walmart in a plastic quart container. Home Depot or other hardware stores have it in gallon and quart cans. It should be in the paint department with other solvents.

I guess that's pretty conclusive evidence that Rattle Trap, like regular FatMat, is asphalt. On a vertical surface like the inner door skin, a heat gun and scraper of some kind is probably your only choice. Mineral spirits will clean off the asphalt residue and denatured alcohol will clean up any remaining oily residue. I'd be careful about using acetone - it can take the e-coat, primer or paint right down to bare metal in one swipe. If you have any on horizontal surfaces like the floor or trunk or hatch floor, dry ice might be worth trying. Sometimes putting pieces on the material for a few minutes will freeze it enough that it will just shatter off cleanly when you whack it with a mallet. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but if it does work it's so much easier than the alternative that it's worth the shot. It's also fun to play with dry ice.

The best solution I've found for actual panel flex is to go to Home Depot and by a cartridge of PL Premium construction adhesive and aluminum bars. Glue the aluminum to the panels, tape it down tightly while it cures and wait 24 hours. Then put vibration damper between the bars. Actually, welding steel bars to the sheet metal is probably best, but that's a little crazier than most people want to get

My pleasure - very glad you like them.

My pleasure - better change the shipping address to South Cackalacky

We build our own in Maryland

Thousands

None of us have a chance against the mighty AudioWrap. Remember: "The Aluminum does enhance stereo and bass acoustics".

Aaron approved Many of you know that other than an occasional blemished sheet of CCF, I don't usually offer B-Stock items. I just received a few pallets of CLD Tiles that are slightly too thin and instead of being cut square, are about 10° off. The adhesive is fine. The foil is fine. Just a little thin, like between normal and Dynamat thickness. I've received sub-par shipments before and have refused to accept them. They've ended up as landfill. These are too good to throw away. While they last, I'll be selling them, for $1.25, 40 at a time. 40 fit in a USPS Priority Flat Rate box that will ship anywhere in the US for $10.40. That means: 40 B-Stock CLD Tiles @ 1.25 = $50.00 Shipping: 10.70 Total: $60.70 As many boxes as you like. I'd use these myself and will if any projects come along, I'd just use a couple more. Just e-mail if you're interested: [email protected]

It's definitely best to use them in combination - you don't want the MLV to be in direct contact with the sheet metal. Use CCF to lift it off. It gets confusing because you'll see a lot of pretty outrageous claims made for CCF. Some people claim it blocks sound, others say it absorbs it. In reality, it does neither very well at all. You need to think of CCF as serving a mechanical and not an acoustical function: it keeps two things that would otherwise be in contact with each other apart. This can be MLV and sheet metal or a trim panel and sheet metal. It basically stops rattles and stops vibrations from being transmitted from one object to another. It's a gasketing material. You need mass to block sound. That's where MLV comes in. CCF is much to light to block anything useful at all. You need thickness to absorb. CCF is a poor absorber of sound for the same reason it won't absorb water. Even if it were a great absorber, a 1/8" thick material will only absorb frequencies above the audible range. A 1/4" material will just barely get into the audible range. This is why it makes no sense to line the outer skin with CCF to "absorb the back wave" from door mounted speakers. Who has speakers in their doors producing frequencies >= 27 kHz? Even if you did, how much are you willing to do to absorb it. If you wanted to absorb something meaningful, say 500 Hz, you'd need an absorbent material that's 6 or 7 inches thick. I've asked the people who claim CCF on the outer skin does wonders to explain how it does anything at all. They invariably say that they applied vibration damper to the outer skin, inner skin, trim panel and everything else they can reach. Then they applied a layer of CCF. After all of this, the speakers sound better, therefore the CCF did hat it was supposed to do The only solution that makes any sense is to acoustically reinforce the inner skin. Doing that makes what is going on with the back wave much less important. This is one of the reasons I always hang MLV on the inner skin if I can, especially if there are speakers in the doors. Adding MLV to either the inner skin or outer skin will do a pretty good job of blocking exterior noise. Inner skin improves speaker performance. Outer skin makes it harder to hear the speakers outside the car. Doors are one of the areas that frequently require us to make compromises - practical realities stop us from creating the theoretically ideal solution. For outer skin treatment I go Sheet Metal / CCF / MLV, using this technique. This requires sufficiently large access holes to get to the outer skin. The main practical reality to deal with when applying CCF and MLV to the inner skin is getting the trim panel back on. The ideal would be Sheet Metal / CCF / MLV / CCF / Trim Panel. In many cases, moving the MLV away from the sheet metal by even 1/8" will make it impossible to get the trim panel back on. For this reason, I usually hang the MLV directly on the inner skin and add a layer of CCF to the side facing the trim panel. WHen you reinstall the trim panel, the CCF compresses, the MLV is forced against the inner skin and it works out pretty well. Here's my usual door "recipe": ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Clean the outer skin thoroughly. No matter how clean the rest of the vehicle is, the inside of the doors is likely to be filthy. I use denatured alcohol on a rag. Wipe it down until the rag comes out clean. Start by pressing Extruded Butyl Rope (EBR) between the outer skin and the side impact protection beams. Leave gaps every few inches to allow water to drain. Cut some strips from a heavy plastic bag and press them into the top surface of the EBR to protect it from dirt. Apply half the CLD Tiles allocated to the outer skin above and half below the side impact protection beam. Cut 2 more CLD Tiles into smaller pieces and apply them to the inner door skin. Hang MLV on the inner door skin using Velcro Strips with pressure sensitive adhesive on both sides. The strips are 2"X4" but you can cut them in half for this application (most applications really). Start with 2 pieces in the top corners to hold the MLV in place while you trim it to fit. You want it to be as large as it can be - just barely fitting inside the trim panel when it is replaced. You will need to cut some holes in the MLV to allow cables, rods, shafts, wires, clips and the speakers to come through. You want these holes to be as small as possible. Every place we use MLV we are building a barrier and a barrier needs to be as large and contiguous as possible. It helps during the fitting process to periodically remove the MLV from the door and lay it in the trim panel to test fit it. The Velcro makes this easy. When you first hang the MLV on the door, cut holes where the trim panel clips go into the door. You can then use these holes to orient the MLV inside the trim panel. When you are satisfied with the MLV fit, add two more Velcro Strip pieces to the bottom corners. It's generally a good idea to add a third piece on top for added strength. Finally, use HH-66 Vinyl Cement to tack a layer of closed cell foam (CCF) on the side of the MLV facing the trim panel. When the trim panel is reinstalled, the CCF will compress slightly, getting rid of rattles and buzzes in the trim panel itself and between the trim panel and the inner door skin. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ I'll bet you're sorry you asked

90% of my customers are people who just want a quiet ride - it's definitely not just car audio guys. Pickups are the easiest vehicles to treat. Gut them and it's just a big cube, almost all flat surfaces. You can treat a pickup in 1/3 the time it takes to do a car or SUV.

I know I've peen promising a shopping cart for a while now, but I've pretty much decided not to do it. Maybe some day. For one thing, calculating shipping costs is very complicated for these products. It's important to me to just charge you what shipping costs me, so until I can figure out a way to handle that without built in padding, I'd rather do it myself. Most people have no experience with sound deadening and most of those who do have done things differently. I like to work through your project with you - to make sure you get what you need and understand how to use the products ou buy. You can ask any questions you may have (including where to start) or place an order by e-mailing me with a list of what you need. I'll calculate shipping and you can pay through PayPal or with a credit card. Thanks very much for your patience. [email protected]

Actually, they're not the same thing. They're both butyl compounds extruded and rolled up the same way, but they aren't the same butyl compound. There's no doubt that they could be used for some of the same purposes, but I would never suggest that anybody use the product I sell to set a windshield. My Extruded Butyl Rope is the same as the adhesive on the CLD Tiles I sell. It's optimized for vibration damping, not sealing.

Either would probably do the job. Splashing against the sheet metal excites resonance and any decent vibration damper should tame it. Something people always notice after treating the roof is the difference in what it sounds like in the rain. Some vehicles will scare you with the racket in a sudden downpour.